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allAfrica.com: Africa: Smallholder Agriculture Transforms Lives of Poor
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Foremost amongst the factors that undermine smallholder agriculture is the gross undercapitalization of the sector. Investment in key areas such as research, infrastructure development, mechanization, irrigation, value chain development and human capital development lags behind that in other developing regions and has actually declined over the past decade.
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In countries such as India and Thailand, public investments in agriculture have substantially reduced rural poverty by stimulating agricultural growth and reducing food prices. Investments in other key facets of the rural economy such as road infrastructure and education have also been shown to have large positive outcomes. These findings suggest that the "how" of agricultural spending can be as important as the "how much".
Pambazuka News : Issue 459
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Food sovereignty entails transforming the current food system to ensure that those who produce food have equitable access to, and control over land, water, seeds, fisheries and agricultural biodiversity.
Pambazuka - Land grabs: Africa's new ‘resource curse’?
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Studies by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) revealed, ‘Many countries do not have sufficient mechanisms to protect local rights and take account of local interests, livelihoods, and welfare. Moreover, local communities are rarely adequately informed about the land concessions that are made to private companies. Insecure local land rights, inaccessible registration procedures, vaguely defined productive use requirements, legislative gaps, and other factors all too often undermine the position of local people vis-à-vis international actors.’[1]
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In Madagascar, a 99-year lease on 3.2 million acres of land – 50 per cent of Madagascar’s arable land, granted to multinational Daewoo ‘ensuring food security’ for South Korea, lead to a coup. ‘In the constitution, it is stipulated that Madagascar’s land is neither for sale nor for rent, so the agreement with Daewoo is cancelled,’ said current president Andry Rajoelina, a baby-faced former DJ, backed by the army – and allegedly, the majority of Malagasys, 70 per cent of whom depend on farmland for income. ‘One of the biggest problems for farmers in Madagascar is land ownership, and we think it’s unfair for the government to be selling or leasing land to foreigners when local farmers do not have enough land,’ an official from Madagascar’s Farmer’s Confederation revealed to Reuters.
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Pambazuka - Profits before people: The great African liquidation sale
"it was all summed up clearly for me by members of COPAGEN, a coalition of African farmer associations, scientists, civil society groups and activists who work to protect Africa’s genetic heritage, farmer rights, and their sovereignty over their land, seeds and food. All these knowledgeable people have shown me that the answer is quite straightforward: many of those imported mistakes, disguised as solutions for Africa, are very, very profitable. At least for those who design and make them."
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it was all summed up clearly for me by members of COPAGEN, a coalition of African farmer associations, scientists, civil society groups and activists who work to protect Africa’s genetic heritage, farmer rights, and their sovereignty over their land, seeds and food. All these knowledgeable people have shown me that the answer is quite straightforward: many of those imported mistakes, disguised as solutions for Africa, are very, very profitable. At least for those who design and make them.
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These monetarist schemes have helped to make Africa poorer and even more dependent on foreign donors and capital, and thus more vulnerable to still more of the big plans, so that now, even as Africans struggle to confront the perfect storm of the global food crisis, financial crisis and climate change – all of which are the offspring of the unfettered free-market financial system – the same big planners are at it again with more sweeping solutions (profitable ones) for the problems they themselves caused.
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Mwalimu Nyerere’s ideas on land
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Vandana Shiva, who dismisses the Western conception of property which respects only capital investment and not the fact that conception of non-western indigenous communities and cultures recognise that investment can also be of labour and nurturance“ (Shiva 2001: 44). Although Nyerere held this view, in practice his government acted to the contrary. Like the colonial state before him, more and more land, especially of the pastoralist communities was alienated.
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his views are in many ways similar to those of Karl Polanyi on what he calls fictitious commodities.
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Resist/Submit: Biofuels, corporate agriculture and the predicted crisis of land and food
"It is wrong to burn the food of the poor to drive the cars of the rich."
Press Release: The Great Land Grab
The Great Land Grab critically examines the role of the private sector in agricultural development and exposes implications of private sector control over food resources. The report concludes that those who promote the benefits of private sector growth in agriculture fail to recognize that acquisition of crucial food-producing lands by foreign private entities poses a threat to rural economies and livelihoods, land reform agendas, and other efforts aimed at making access to food more equitable.
The oil we eat: Following the food chain back to Iraq, By Richard Manning (Harper's Magazine)
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“In this situation, we
cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships
which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so,
we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere
on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.”“The
day is not far off,” Kennan concluded, “when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.” -
As Kennan recognized, however, the maintenance of such a concentration of wealth often requires violent action. Agriculture
is a recent human experiment. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a broad variety of nature's offerings.
Why humans might have traded this approach for the complexities of agriculture is an interesting and long-debated question,
especially because the skeletal evidence clearly indicates that early farmers were more poorly nourished, more disease-ridden
and deformed, than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries. Farming did not improve most lives. The evidence that best points
to the answer, I think, lies in the difference between early agricultural villages and their pre-agricultural counterparts—the
presence not just of grain but of granaries and, more tellingly, of just a few houses significantly larger and more ornate
than all the others attached to those granaries. Agriculture was not so much about food as it was about the accumulation of
wealth. It benefited some humans, and those people have been in charge ever since.
Africa's Unnatural Disaster
The strategies of the World Bank and IMF have successfully applied shock doctrine methods to plunder the globe, causing widespread hardship and suffering, for the benefit of the few and creating millions of victims. They are the embodiment of psychopathy on a global scale, and from that perspective, they are not 'failed', but actually a devastating and horrific success.
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AGRA’s assumptions – and those of the mainstream media – rest on the premise that the Africa’s hunger problem is one of production. While production may be part of the story, it’s far from the complete picture. The heart of the agriculture crisis that Africa and the world are currently experiencing lies in the failed policy paradigm promoted by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, institutions that still have enormous control over economic policy in many African countries.
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The second concession that the 2008 WDR makes to reality (as opposed to market fundamentalist ideology) is an allowance for targeted subsidies.
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Climate change and adaptation in African agriculture
The development of climate projections for Africa is evolving rapidly, yet little is known about how effectively this data is being utilised. This study, commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation, set out to identify and understand the extent to which, and ways in which, information from climate change models is being integrated into agricultural development practice and decision making in Africa.
FAO: SD Dimensions
The challenge facing agriculture is to satisfy people's rights to food security and, at the same time, ensure that the natural resource base remains productive for the future. As populations grow, and land and water resources dwindle, the world must make a rapid shift to sustainable agriculture and rural development. This approach seeks to ensure that present and future generations have equal access to the total capital of natural and human resources.
The Sustainable Development Department (SD) serves as a global reference centre for knowledge and advice on biophysical, biological, socio-economic and social dimensions of sustainable development. It was established by FAO in January 1995, in response to the need to take a more holistic and strategic approach to development support and poverty alleviation. SD focuses on four key dimensions of sustainability:
SD : Institutions: State reforms and the decentralization of the agricultural and rural public sector: Lessons from the Latin American experience
This paper is about strengthening the institutions that ensure good governance. Strengthening the institutional capacities of local governments is important for: 1) economic reasons (e.g. productive and allocative efficiency), 2) equity reasons (territorial and social equity); and 3) political reasons (e.g. elected officers' accountability to citizens, citizens' participation in decision-making, and democratization of decision-making).
The Cutting Edge: Peak Food: Blaming the Victims
Driven by capitalist imperatives for short-term profit maximisation and long-term cost-minimisation, global agribusiness has established an international food production system that is, basically, dying.
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Why is that the government-backed report discussed in today's Independent, says nothing about the institutions who are primarily responsible for food wastage, the supermarkets, the multinational food chains? If the government is genuinely concerned about food wastage in this country, why won't they do something about the fact reported by the same newspaper in February, that:
"Retailers generate 1.6 million tonnes of food waste each year... -
Driven by capitalist imperatives for short-term profit maximisation and long-term cost-minimisation, global agribusiness has established an international food production system that is, basically, dying.
Multinationals make billions in profit out of growing global food crisis - Green Living, Environment - The Independent
Cargill says that its results "reflect the cumulative effect of having invested more than $18bn in fixed and working capital over the past seven years to expand our physical facilities, service capabilities, and knowledge around the world".
The revelations are bound to increase outrage over multinational companies following last week's disclosure that Shell and BP between them recorded profits of £14bn in the first three months of the year – or £3m an hour – on the back of rising oil prices. Shell promptly attracted even greater condemnation by announcing that it was pulling out of plans to build the world's biggest wind farm off the Kent coast.
World leaders are to meet next month at a special summit on the food crisis, and it will be high on the agenda of the G8 summit of the world's richest countries in Hokkaido, Japan, in July.
Pambazuka News
An absolute priority has to be given to domestic food production in order to decrease dependency on the international market. Peasants and small farmers should be encouraged through better prices for their farm products and stable markets to produce food for themselves and their communities. Landless families from rural and urban areas have to get access to land, seeds and water to produce their own food. This means increased investment in peasant and farmer-based food production for domestic markets.
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